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The sun rises in the east, thus the entrance to the sun also lies in the east.
-Yanta speaks, 1.1
Along with my family, I faced the rest of our clan across our ship’s wooden deck. The big vessel had been our home for seven years. It tilted in the gentle...

There is neither time nor weight where I come from; neither gravity nor history. The Earth has whirled around the sun more than a hundred times since the first human settlers came to Sedna, and yet out there in the Kuiper belt, it remains forever the year...

“How do you know when you’re dead?” Demrick Fauston asked The Reverend Charles Spears, Rector of the Downtown Church of Our Savior.
It was the first time the developer had been in Spears’ study since a dispute over the endowment years before....

Man’s greatness even in his concupiscence. He has managed to produce
such a remarkable system from it and make it the image of true charity.
--Blaise Pascal, Pensees
***
This is the story of my one hiring failure: how I made the wrong decision,...

Later that night, in the apartment behind the tea house, Yusen would quarrel with his wife about the dreams ­­ about their meaning and their source, and about how Yusen came to throw away three weeks’ profit for them. Yusen’s wife would speak hatefully...

Everyone knew household robots did not pray, chant or meditate. Little wonder, then, that Kris watched in stunned denial, coffee and cranberry muffin forgotten, when her household bot lowered itself to the kitchen floor and struggled to cross its telescoping...

If you visit the planet Azagarth, bring warm clothes. Most of the year it's under five degrees Celsius, and even colder in the valleys, around which the ice -- which is orange here, not white, due to some strange refraction of the dual, distant suns -- rises...

Zach nudged open the creaky door which led to Brill’s atelier. He scanned the room, hoping for something unexpected to liven his day, but it looked the same as always: paintings of strange places Brill called fields, forests, and mountains hanging on the stone...

Meeting Kevin’s parents for the first time, Greta was at once sure -- or almost sure -- that she was right.
“A monk!” Kevin’s mother Gloria had whispered in the kitchen. “Can you imagine? Raised as an Episcopalian, and he wants to be a monk....

"The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want."
The man had been reciting the psalm when they wheeled him into the curtained examination room and parked the gurney next to the wall. Doc Hampshire was hoping he would stop when he reached the end, but he just...